Microwave characterization of thin film materials for interconnections of advanced packaging

Low permittivity insulator layers made of new organic or inorganic materials, associated to conductive layers, with thickness less than one micrometer are used more and more to develop interconnections of microwave or high speed circuits, and electronic packaging. Such thin film microstrip lines have been modeled between 1 GHz and 40 GHz using a rigorous full-wave method based on a modified transverse resonance technique. Comparison between theoretical and experimental propagation constants enables us to extract the in-situ complex permittivity of insulators and the electrical conductivity of conductors by an iterative optimization technique.